Nikolay V. Dokholyan

Nikolay V. Dokholyan

Area of interest

The mission of my laboratory is to develop and apply integrated computational and experimental strategies to understand, sense, and control proteins, and uncover the etiologies of human diseases. In collaboration with Prof. Hahn laboratory, we are working toward developing genetically-encoded proteins that bind and report rare/intermediate conformations of target molecules (proteins and RNA). We currently have prototypes for Erk and Src biosensors, but aim to generalize this approach to a diverse range of targets.

We are also working toward developing genetically-encoded proteins that control target proteins with light and/or drugs. We have developed novel approach for drug activation/deactivation of kinases, and light-activatable protein to manipulate protein function with light. We are working toward extending these approaches to other classes of proteins and on multiplexing, whereby we selectively activate/control several distinct cellular pathways via targeting several proteins simultaneously.

We have also developed an accurate computational drug screening platform MedusaDock that is capable of identifying small molecules that bind to a specific target. Using MedusaDock we have already identified active compounds for two targets and we plan to use it for cancer relevant targets.

Awards and Honors

2011-present Book Series Editor, Series in Computational Biophysics

2011 Editor-in-Chief, Research and Reports in Biochemistry

2004-2006 March of Dimes Basil O’Connor Starter Scholar Research Award

2004 The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill IBM Junior Faculty Development Award